3
Monday 15 December
THE TAXI DRIVER handed Liss’s credit card back to her. She’d been living on it for a while now. Wasn’t sure how much more she could squeeze out of it; didn’t want to find out. She stepped out into the slushy snow. The weather had turned milder during the night. She’d spent most of it in the hotel room in Parkveien looking out the window at the rain.
She stepped experimentally through the puddles in the driveway. It was something like four years since she’d last been there.
Almost as soon as she rang, the door was cautiously opened. Tage’s head appeared.
– Liss, he exclaimed, and put his hand to his forehead. He had grown a beard since she last saw him, short and grey. There was hardly a wisp of hair left on his head. And the eyes seemed smaller behind the round spectacles. She felt almost relieved to see him. Perhaps because it wasn’t her mother who had opened the door.
For a moment it looked as though he was going to embrace her, but fortunately he decided against it.
– What in the world? But come in, come in. He shouted back into the house: – Ragnhild!
Tage still pronounced her name in that strange Swedish way. They had never got used to it. She remembered what she thought that day fifteen years ago, the first time he came to their house: a person who says Mother’s name in such a weird way is definitely not going to be allowed to move into our house. But thinking that hadn’t helped.
Tage got no answer and called out again, adding this time: – It’s Liss.
Liss heard a sound from the living room. The next moment her mother was standing in the doorway, her face drawn and without make-up. She gasped, but her eyes looked far away.
– Liss, she murmured, and stayed where she was.
Liss kicked off her boots, crossed the threshold, into the hallway. Had decided in advance to give Mother a hug, but that didn’t happen.
– You’re here. Mother took hold of her arm, as though to reassure herself her eyes were not deceiving her. – There, you see, Tage, she came.
– I never said she wouldn’t, Tage protested as he looked around. – Where are your things?
– What things?
– Suitcase, or bag.
– I just left.
– Okay then, Tage noted. He was an assistant professor in sociology, unless he’d finally got the chair he’d applied for hundreds of times. He always noted things before he permitted himself to have an opinion on them.
They sat in the living room. Not much was said. Liss reeled off something about not being able to sit calmly and wait in Amsterdam. Her mother contented herself with a nod, but was hardly listening. Seemed even more remote now than when Liss had arrived. She must have taken some tranquillisers. It wasn’t like her; she never touched medicines. But now her eyelids were heavy and her pupils small.
Tage withdrew to the kitchen to heat up some leftovers, though Liss had at first said no thanks. He wanted to bring the food into the living room, but she preferred to eat at the kitchen table. He sat with her. Her mother stayed where she was on the sofa. Leafing through a newspaper, Liss could hear.
– How long can you stay? Tage wanted to know.
As though she could give an answer to that. – It all depends.
He nodded, seeming to understand what she meant.
– Tell me what you know about Mailin, she said.
It was the first time since entering the house that she had been able to say the name. In this kitchen where they had sat together since they were small children. Liss wasn’t sure what she actually remembered and what she had seen in old photographs, but in her mind’s eye she saw them sitting at this pine table eating breakfast and supper, scissoring and gluing, rolling dice.
– She went missing on Thursday, is that right?
Tage rubbed the tip of his nose. – She hasn’t been seen since Wednesday. Not that we know of.
– What do you mean by that?
He shook his head. – I don’t know what I mean, Liss. I daren’t have any opinion at all.
– I have to know everything.
Her voice sounded hard. Tage removed his glasses, wiped them with a handkerchief. The fat, probably spitting up from the frying pan, didn’t disappear but spread out in a film across the lenses. He blew on them, misting them, wiped again, still no effect.
– She went out to the cabin, he said once he’d abandoned the cleaning and got his glasses on again. – That was Wednesday night. She always goes out there when she’s working on difficult projects. She spent the night out there, left there the next afternoon, it looks like. People heading for that café in the forest…
– Vangen, said Liss.
– Exactly, Vangen, people saw her car parked in the parking space down by…
– Bysetermosan.
– They saw it there Wednesday evening and the following morning. In the afternoon it was gone.
– She hasn’t come off the road somewhere?
An image of Mailin, trapped in her wrecked car in a deep ditch. Or at the foot of some cliff. Liss ran over the familiar roads in her mind.
– We found her car, Tage told her. – It was parked in Welhavens Street, close by her office. She must have driven there Thursday, in the afternoon. She was supposed to be taking part in that talk show.
– I saw that in the paper. That old rock-preacher Berger.
Tage cleared his throat. – None of us have any idea why she agreed to do that. The man is a complete arsehole, pardon my French.
Liss shrugged her shoulders. – He wants to break down a few taboos. Is that such a bad thing?
– My dear Liss, Berger and his disciples are parasites on the conception of free thinking, Tage announced. – But pretty soon no one’s going to be allowed to say so out loud any more. The fear of being called politically correct is a more efficient way of censoring people than any dictatorship could come up with.
It was clear that she’d got him going on one of his hobby horses. He walked over to the fridge, took out a beer, fetched two glasses and filled them both.
– On the pretext of freeing us from old prejudices, they create new ones that are a great deal worse.
Tage seemed irritated, which was unlike him. He could be grumpy and peevish, but he’d always found it difficult to display anger.
– The worst thing is, young people have started turning him into a cult figure. Even my most serious students regard him as a revolutionary. And now you think of me as some old codger who doesn’t understand the changing times, or worse still, has no sense of humour.
She had probably always thought of him as an old codger. But she could see that he had his own special sense of dry, intellectual humour. He could even make her laugh with his puns and his word games. All in all he was a decent, well-intentioned person. It was just that she’d never liked him.
– Berger flirts with heroin abuse, with paedophilia, with Satanism; he turns all accepted ideas of what’s right and wrong upside down. But what I say to my students is this: that with views expressed in the public arena comes responsibility; these are public acts, something quite different from choosing which suit you think you look best in.
– Mailin wanted to take part in his programme, Liss pointed out.
Tage sighed deeply. – I’m sure her intentions were good. But I doubt she would have achieved anything beyond confirming that the right to be a bastard takes precedence over everything else, as long as people find it entertaining.
It looked as if he were getting rid of a long-pent-up frustration by abusing some clapped-out old rock star who’d been allowed to let it all hang out on TV. You had to be pretty naïve to allow yourself to be provoked by something like that, thought Liss. Norwegian, at the very least – or Swedish. In Holland, that stuff didn’t attract much attention any more.
She let him carry on while she ate a few mouthfuls. Then she interrupted: – You say her car was parked outside her office?